he origins of Sinitic Scott DeLancey University of Oregon A persistent problem in Sino-Tibetan linguistics is that Chinese is characterized by a mix of lexical, phonological, and syntactic features, some of which link it to the Tibeto-Burman languages, others to the Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, and Mon-Khmer families of Southeast Asia. It has always been recognized that this must relect intense language contact. his paper develops a hypothesis about the nature of that contact. he language of Shang was a highly-creolized lingua franca based on languages of the Southeast Asian type. Sinitic is a result of the imposition of the Sino-Tibetan language of the Zhou on a population speaking this lingua franca, resulting in a language with substantially Sino-Tibetan lexicon and relict morphology, but Southeast Asian basic syntax. Keywords: Chinese; Sinitic; Sino-Tibetan; Tibeto-Burman; language contact . he problem of Sinitic Sino-Tibetan includes the Chinese languages and a very large number – several hundred, if we count languages at the level of distinctness which we do in Europe (see Tournadre 2008) – of languages which are lumped together under the label Tibeto-Burman. A basic problem of Sino-Tibetan linguistics is the dramatic typological and lexical divergence between these two putative branches of the family. It has long been clear than an account of the formation of Chinese must account for its strong lexical, phonological, and grammatical connections both with the Tibeto-Burman languages to the west and with the Southeast Asian languages to the south, Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien and Mon-Khmer. While basic vocabulary and some reconstructible morphology clearly link Sinitic genetically to the Tibeto-Burman languages, its basic morphosyntactic proile is the isolating SVO type characteristic of mainland Southeast Asia rather than the agglutinating SOV structure characteristic of Tibeto-Burman. Benedict sums up the problem: [T]he following facts in re Chinese and Tibeto-Burman (or Tibeto-Karen) should be resumed: (a) Chinese shows almost no trace of the fairly elaborate TB morphology, (b) the two stocks have only a small segment of roots in common,  Scott DeLancey (c) the phonological systems of the two stocks difer in many respects, and can scarcely be reconciled at some points, (d) the tonal systems of the two stocks appear not to be correlated. Our belief that the two stocks are genetically related must rest, ultimately, on the fact that they have certain basic roots in common, and that phonological generalization can be established for these roots. It might be argued that the ST elements constitute only a superstratum in Chinese, and that the substratum is of distinct origin. In historical terms, the Chou people might be regarded as the bearers of a ST language, which became fused with, or perhaps immersed in, a non-ST language spoken by the Shang people. In any event, it is certain that the ST hypothesis illuminates only one of the many dark recesses in the complex linguistic history of the Chinese. (Benedict 1972: 195–7) his divergence is suicient to inspire occasional doubts about the genetic relationship of Sinitic to the Tibeto-Burman languages on the part of historians and others (e.g. Beckwith 2002, 2006), though few if any linguists still doubt that the history of Sinitic is of a Tibeto-Burman language whose lexicon and grammatical structure was drastically reorganized in the mouths of a population speaking Kadai, Hmong-Mien, and/or Austroasiatic, and quite possibly other, languages (see discussion in Benedict 1976: 167). . Sinitic and its southern neighbors here is more diversity of opinion on the internal structure of Sino-Tibetan (and hence on the appropriateness of that term). he prevalent view sees Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman as the two primary branches of the family, on grounds of their very evident structural and lexical divergence. his is problematic, however, since the deining characteristics are all on one side. Sinitic is a small, cohesive unit of between half a dozen and several dozen languages (again depending on the level at which we count). In size, divergence and apparent time depth it is more comparable to lower-level Tibeto-Burman branches like Bodic or Bodo-Konyak-Jinghpaw than to “Tibeto-Burman” as a whole. And Tibeto-Burman itself is a very problematic construct, since, unlike Sinitic, it cannot be deined by any shared innovations. Assuming that Proto-Sino-Tibetan had the SOV typology still found throughout the family except for Sinitic, Bai and Karen (see below), “Tibeto-Burman” languages share no deining qualities, they are simply all the Sino-Tibetan languages that aren’t Sinitic. On these and other grounds van Driem (1997, 1999, 2005, 2008, see also Jacques to appear) suggests abandoning the Sino-Tibetan model for a view of the family in which Sinitic is simply one subordinate unit among others; van Driem in fact argues that it is a subbranch within Bodic. his issue does not bear directly on the argument of this paper, but our conclusions are relevant to the question. he conventional view of the family as Sinitic + Tibeto-Burman is based on divergent characteristics of Sinitic which, as we will see, it shares with the Bai Yue languages he origins of Sinitic rather than with Tibeto-Burman. An account of how these traits came into Sinitic from its southern neighbors within historic or proto-historic times would explain the extreme divergence of Sinitic within Sino-Tibetan without requiring great time depth for its split from the rest of the family, and thus vitiate the argument for a bipartite Sino-Tibetan model. (Benedict’s (1976: 172f) extensive argument for a TB-Sinitic split based on diferential retention in various languages of PST lexical roots is essentially congruent with the broader argument that Sinitic must be distinct because it is structurally so diferent. Both arguments lose their force if we can reconstruct a scenario of rapid language shit under intense contact). he evidence which requires explanation falls into four broad categories: lexical correspondences among Chinese and one or more other languages or families, morphological correspondences between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman, and the striking similarities in both syntactic and phonological structure between Chinese and the mainland Southeast Asian families. he diiculty is that there is signiicant evidence linking Chinese with several diferent language groups, including TaiKadai, Hmong-Mien, Austroasiatic, and Austronesian, but it cannot be genetically related to all or even several of them.1 Most of what Chinese shares with most of these languages must thus have resulted from language contact. he fundamental problem of Sinitic historical linguistics is to unravel the various linguistic threads which make up Old Chinese and its predecessors and understand how they came to be woven together into the language which we know. An important part of the problem is that the features which distinguish Sinitic from Tibeto-Burman are shared with not one, but all of the southern language groups – Hmong-Mien, Tai-Kadai, and Viet-Muong – which all share a characteristic, very marked areal syntactic and phonological proile (Henderson 1965; Matisof 1992; Enield 2003, 2011). hus the contact scenario which we need to reconstruct must be considerably more complex than the simple imposition of a Sino-Tibetan superstratum on a monolingual substrate population. .. Lexical correlations While a large part of the Chinese lexicon connects with Tibeto-Burman (Benedict 1976; Nishida 1976), there is a substantial body of vocabulary shared with one or more of Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, and Vietnamese. And in some respects the phonological structure of Sinitic is closer to that of Viet-Muong or Tai-Kadai than to Tibeto-Burman. In this section I will very briely review some of the reasons why these congruences do not argue for a genetic relationship among any of these languages. Most scholars accept Benedict’s assertion that the issue hinges on “the amount of “core” vocabulary shared by the languages under consideration” (1976: 168, cp. Baxter 1995), but the appropriate conclusions to be drawn from the evidence remain subject to some debate. In the following section we will see that,   Scott DeLancey as usual in comparative linguistics, it is morphology which provides us with the crucial evidence. Since the earliest days of serious linguistic study of Chinese, scholars have noted the substantial vocabulary shared between Chinese and neighboring languages. A great deal of this was obviously borrowed from Chinese, which throughout historic times has been the major cultural force in East Asia. But there is also a very substantial body of vocabulary shared with Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, and/ or Vietnamese, which is much older, and it is not easy to determine whether such shared forms are common inheritance or borrowing, and in the latter (more likely) case, borrowing in what direction. Aside from the Tibeto-Burman languages (Matisof 2003), Chinese has been linked with Tai-Kadai (Wulf 1934; Nishida 1975; Li 1945, 1976; Manomaivibool 1975, 1976a, b, inter alia), Austroasiatic (Norman & Mei 1976), and Hmong-Mien (Downer 1963, 1971; Wang 1986; Haudricourt & Strecker 1991).2 (he Austronesian comparisons advanced by Sagart (1994, 1995, 1999) are now (2005) considered to relect an older connection between Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan, rather than speciically Sinitic, which thus takes Austronesian comparisons out of our purview). On the one hand, all of these proposals are supported by serious lexical comparisons, and some sort of historical connection with Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien and Austroasiatic (and speciically Viet-Muong) is established both by shared lexicon and by the astonishing correspondence in phonological typology (see below). But these three groups are not evidently related, so Sinitic can hardly be genetically related to all of them, much less to all of them and TibetoBurman as well, except at some very hypothetical, very high, level. hus it has long been clear that some of the evidence which has been adduced to argue for genetic relations among these languages in fact relects sustained intense contact among unrelated languages. he interpretation of the lexical evidence has sometimes been confused by unrealistic notions of when and how borrowing can take place, in particular simplistic ideas that lexical borrowing only occurs from a more dominant into a smaller and less “advanced” population, or under some kind of necessity. For example, Manomaivibool (1975: 364), discussing shared Tai-Chinese vocabulary, says “It seems implausible that Tai had to borrow that many items of such common vocabulary from Chinese” (emphasis added). But under many contact scenarios it is impossible to distinguish borrowings from cognates purely on how easily one can imagine a motivation for borrowing a word with a particular meaning.3 I will suggest a model of language contact which makes room for the sort of unsystematic lexical mixture which we ind in Chinese. It has been suggested (Li 1976; Manomaivibool 1975, 1976a, b; Nishida 1975, 1976) that if a Sino-Tai form can be reconstructed for Proto-Tai-Kadai, this is he origins of Sinitic evidence for genetic relationship between Sinitic and T–K, presumably on the grounds that PTK is too old to have been contemporary with any stage of Chinese, so that there would be no time at which borrowing could have taken place. But there is no logic to this argument – whether we imagine the common vocabulary to relect a common proto-language or to represent borrowings, in either case PT-K or something ancestral to it, and Old Chinese or something ancestral to it, must have been contemporaneous. Noting this fact does not constitute an argument for one hypothesis or the other. What is important is that Li and other scholars consider the oldest layer of shared Tai-Chinese vocabulary (which certainly represents loans in both directions, not only from Chinese to Tai) to be of at least Old Chinese date, so that this common lexicon probably dates from the earliest contact. .. he Southeast Asian phonological proile he most impressive correspondence between Sinitic and the Southeast Asian Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, and Viet-Muong languages is in their phonological structure (Henderson 1965; Matisof 2001; R. Li 2005). All share the stereotypical monosyllabic morpheme structure and elaborate tone systems. he most striking, and puzzling, fact about this congruence is the perfect correspondence of the tone systems (Wulf 1934; Haudricourt 1954a, b; Li 1945, 1976; Matisof 1973; Ostapirat 2000; Ratlif 2010). Sinitic, Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, and Vietnamese all have a four-tone system, with a three-way distinction on “smooth”, i.e. open or sonorant-inal syllables, and all “checked”, i.e. obstruent-inal, syllables manifesting a distinct fourth tone. Each of the other three shares with Sinitic (and to some extent with each other) a substantial body of shared vocabulary which shows regular correspondence in tone class. However, several generations of research have made it clear that this tone system is a secondary development in each of the families, not reconstructable to any common ancestral system: Tonal similarities – even regular tonal correspondences – are not to be taken uncritically as evidence for genetic relationship among languages. Indeed, tonal criteria are not even suicient to establish genetic subgrouping for languages that are already known to be genetically related. (Matisof 1973: 89) In all of the languages tones originated out of inal laryngeal features, so that the original correspondence is in the type of rime: obstruent coda, coda *-h (sometimes < *-s), inal *-ʔ, and “smooth” syllables with none of these (Haudricourt 1954a, b, 1961/1972; Mei 1970, 1980). he shared vocabulary which shows these correspondences must have been borrowed at a stage when both the donor and recipient languages still retained these inal laryngeal distinctions, and had not yet developed phonemic tone; if we imagine that these items were borrowed with   Scott DeLancey phonemic tone, it becomes impossible to explain the regularity of the correspondences. (For a clear exposition of this argument see Ratlif 2010: 187–93). he languages must have still been in close contact when they underwent a shared tonogenetic episode in which these laryngeal distinctions were reinterpreted as tonal, as they were still centuries later when they all shared in the “Great Tone Split” conditioned by mergers of initial consonant series. he monosyllabic pattern is not really characteristic of Austroasiatic, or even of Tai-Kadai, and the Sinitic developments do have parallels in the phonological development of other Sino-Tibetan groups. So Benedict (1976) and Sagart (Sagart 1999) are probably right in attributing the original locus of monosyllabic structure to Chinese: he new linguistic standard of the Han dynasty … typologically characterized by its incipient isolating morphology, and its emergent tonal and monosyllabic phonology, gradually spread to all parts of the empire, north and south, and this same typology further spread to all non-Chinese languages spoken in territories under Chinese rule ater the Han: all of Miao-Yao, Viet-Muong (but not the rest of Mon-Khmer), all of Kam-Tai, some south-eastern Tibeto-Burman languages including Lolo-Burmese (but not Tibetan, Qiang, Gyarong, etc.). (Sagart 1999: 8) . Morphological evidence for Sino-Tibetan he strongest evidence for the genetic ailiation of Sinitic with the Tibeto-Burman languages is grammatical, speciically correspondences in personal pronouns and in some reconstructable verb morphology. (For further discussion see Jacques to appear). Benedict (1976), in summarizing the evidence for Sino-Tibetan, relies very strongly on lexical correspondences, and makes a strong case that the lexical evidence overall overwhelmingly supports the genetic connection of Sinitic with the other Tibeto-Burman languages. But purely lexical evidence is never suiciently convincing for the conservative comparativist, and, as we have seen, in the case of Sinitic, there is suicient, and suiciently diverse, non-Sino-Tibetan lexical material to lead many linguists to look for genetic explanations for it. herefore, as always, the argument for genetic relationship must rely fundamentally on morphological comparisons. .. he pronouns An important argument for the Sino-Tibetan ailiation of Chinese has always been the correspondence of the 1st and 2nd person pronominal roots. Sagart reconstructs the following pronominal paradigm found in Eastern Zhou (ca. 700–255 he origins of Sinitic BCE) bronze inscriptions (Sagart 1995, 1999: 142–3, cp. Matisof 1995: 76–7; the forms are reconstructed according to the system of Baxter 1992): 1st a. b. 2nd 吾 *aŋa 汝 *bnaʔ a 我 * ŋajʔ 爾 *bnajʔ Old Chinese 1st and 2nd person pronouns he (a) forms closely match the forms reconstructed for Tibeto-Burman: 1st *ŋa, 2nd *na(ŋ) (Matisof 2003). he (b) forms, obviously derived from the (a) forms, appear in the earliest strata as plurals, but are later attested in singular uses. Although the majority of TB units have something like the (a) forms, which clearly are to be reconstructed for the proto-language, several languages have pronominals which correspond better to the (b) forms, e.g. Jinghpaw ngai ‘I’, and probably Tibetan nged ‘we’. Benedict (1995) identiies the #-i extension in both TB and Sinitic as a topic marker, but Matisof (1995, 2003: 487–8) is more hesitant about assigning a function to it. Given its apparent pluralizing function in Old Chinese, it may better be compared with Tibeto-Burman 1pl element #i (van Driem 1993; LaPolla 2003a), which occurs throughout the family as both an agreement index on the verb and as an element in pronominal forms. However, Sagart argues, on the basis of its late appearance in Shang and Zhou inscriptions, that the 1st person *ŋa root is a secondary development in Chinese (1999: 142–4), and a late borrowing from there into the rest of TibetoBurman (145–6). Instead of the well-established *ŋa, Sagart proposes that the PTB 1st person pronoun was the stop-initial ka (Benedict 1991) which occurs as the primary 1st person root in three (by Sagart’s count) geographically marginal branches of the family, northern Qiangic, Kuki-Chin, and “a few languages of eastern Nepal and neighboring areas”, by which he must be referring to two distinct units, the Kiranti group in Nepal and the Western Himalayan branch in northwest India (see hurgood 1985). He suggests that this distribution relects a spread of *ŋa, ultimately from Chinese, through the contiguous central TB area, leaving only the few branches on the edges of the TB area untouched. hese three (actually four, plus several other unclassiied languages in Nepal and Arunachal Pradesh) then retain what Sagart takes to be the original SinoTibetan 1st person root *ka. his proposal is implausible on various grounds (see also Pulleyblank 1995b: 329). For example, it is hard to imagine any reason why Central Himalayan languages like Kham (1sg ŋa:) and Chepang (ŋa) would have adopted the new form, since they historically have not been under signiicant Chinese, or for that matter even Tibetan, inluence. But in any case Sagart’s proposal cannot be correct,   Scott DeLancey since the nasal root is found in the 1st person agreement suix which is reconstructable for Proto-Tibeto-Burman (Sun 1983; DeLancey 1989, 2010a; van Driem 1993; LaPolla 2003a), and thus long predates its irst appearance in the Chinese inscriptions. Most crucially, we ind it as an agreement suix in all of the branches which Sagart claims retain the original *ka as an independent root – notoriously in Kiranti, but also in Qiangic (LaPolla 2003b), and Kuki-Chin (Henderson 1957; Stern 1963; DeLancey 2013a, b) we ind the nasal agreement suix cooccurring with the stop-initial independent pronoun: (1) Hayu gu nunukur pon la-ŋ I woodpecker become go-1sg ‘I’ll turn into a woodpecker.’ (2) Sizang -ke:i _pai: -le-ŋ: I go if-1sg ‘If I go …’ (Kiranti; Michailovsky 1988: 136) (Kuki-Chin, Stern 1963: 276) Obviously, if the stop-initial pronouns in these languages represent inheritance of the original TB pronoun, there is no possible source for the agreement index. But on the established hypothesis that the PTB pronominal root was *ŋa, the source of the agreement index is self-evident. hus the nasal root is indisputably ascribable to PTB, and cannot be interpreted as a borrowing from Chinese. Since a late borrowing from a Tibeto-Burman source into Chinese does not seem likely here either, we have to recognize this root as dating back to their common ancestor, regardless of its relatively late appearance in the inscriptional evidence in Chinese. But Sagart is correct that the *ka root is also ancient; it now appears that it was a possessive or oblique form contrasting with the nominative *ŋa (Jacques 2007; DeLancey 2011a). What we see in the languages where this form has replaced the original nominative *ŋa, is the replacement of the original inite construction with an innovative inite form based on a nominalization, which thus takes a genitive rather than a nominative “subject”. (hurgood’s (1985) interpretation of this root as originally a topicalizer, seconded by Benedict (1995), does not appear to be correct (DeLancey 2011a), but that is irrelevant to the issue here). .. Ancient morphology While we ind no inlectional morphology recorded in any form of Chinese, the fossils of pre-Chinese preixes and suixes can be found in the phonological alternations of semantically and graphically related words. Two morphological constructions which are securely reconstructible for both Tibeto-Burman and Sinitic he origins of Sinitic are a causative preix *s- (Conrady 1896; Mei 1980, 1988, 2008; Dai 2001) and a nominalizing *-s suix (Downer 1959; Forrest 1960; Mei 1980; Mazo 2002). he *s- causative is retained in Written Tibetan and a handful of other languages, though in many it is no longer productive: Tibetan log ‘return (intransitive)’, slog ‘turn (transitive)’ Boro gab ‘cry’, səgab ‘make s.o. cry’ Trung ip55 ‘sleep’, səip ‘cause to sleep’ In most modern TB languages, we ind the preix relected in devoicing of the initial consonant: Tibetan Zaiwa Boro Newar nub nop gi gya- ‘sink’, ‘sink in mud’, ‘afraid’, ‘afraid’, snub n�op si-gi khya- ‘destroy, abolish’ ‘make s.t. get bogged in mud’ ‘frighten’ ‘frighten’ And we ind the same in Old Chinese (Mei 2008): 见 xiàn 见 jiàn 别 píe 别 pìe ‘be visible’ ‘see’ ‘leave, separate (intr.)’ ‘discriminate, distinguish’ < *gians < *kians < *s–k < *s–g < *bjät < *brjat < *pjät < *prjat < *s–p < *s–b Dai (2001) demonstrates that this construction is ancient in Tibeto-Burman; based on this and the abundant evidence for it in Chinese, Mei (2008) suggests that it is a deining feature of Sino-Tibetan languages. Indeed, it is preserved, at least in fossil form, in some branches which have lost almost all other inherited morphology, e.g. Bodo-Garo. he case for *s- is strong, but for it to be completely conclusive we need to ind actual cognate pairs showing the same alternation in Sinitic and TB. For the other classic comparison, the nominalizing *-s suix, we have the complete case. his suix is relected in Old Chinese tonal alternations (Downer 1959; Forrest 1960); which correspond to the suix which is preserved in Written Tibetan (Mei 1980): Chinese 量 liáng 量 liàng 织 zhī 织 zhì ‘to measure’ ‘a measure’ ‘to weave’ ‘woven goods’ Tibetan < *liaŋ < *liaŋs < *tjək < *tjəks ‘grang ‘to count’ grangs ‘a number’ ‘thag ‘to weave’ thags ‘web, woven stuf ’ In addition to these classic, and now deinitive, comparisons, there is a growing body of plausible morphological comparisons between Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages. Several promising suggestions are summarized in LaPolla 2003a. But even if not all of these comparisons stand up, there is now suicient evidence to   Scott DeLancey establish that the connections between Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman are genetic. Morphological comparisons like this are the sine qua non of comparative linguistics, and without some strong argument discrediting these comparisons, we can take this evidence as conclusively establishing the genetic relationship of Sinitic with the rest of Sino-Tibetan. . Syntactic patterns he most immediately salient feature which distinguishes Sinitic from the TibetoBurman languages is word order. In marked contrast to the SVO order which Sinitic shares with the Bai Yue languages, all the Tibeto-Burman languages except Karen and Bai have SOV order, with typical SOV features such as postpositions, clause-inal subordinators, and postverbal auxiliaries. here is no question that the same was true of their common ancestor, as far back as Proto-Sino-Tibetan: From the fact that we can clearly see changes in the word order of these three languages [Sinitic, Karen, and Bai] over time, and cannot see such changes in the Tibeto-Burman languages other than Bai and Karen, we assume that it was Bai, Karen and Chinese that changed rather than all the other Tibeto-Burman languages. (LaPolla 2003a: 28) he broad shit from Sino-Tibetan to Sinitic is described by Sagart: From a typological point of view, Old Chinese was more similar to modern East Asian languages like Gyarong, Khmer or Atayal than to its daughter language Middle Chinese: its morphemes were nontonal and not strictly monosyllabic; its morphology was essentially derivational, and largely preixing; but it also made use of inixes and suixes. At some point between Old Chinese and Middle Chinese, and for unknown reasons, a cascade of changes caused the language to move away from this model. Its aixing morphology began to freeze; its loosely attached preixes were lost, while other aixes clustered with root segments and were reinterpreted as root material. A new morphemic canon tending toward strict monosyllabism, with a great variety of initial and inal consonant clusters, emerged. Further shits saw the reduction of initial clusters, this resulting in a more complex inventory of initial consonants, and in new vowel contrasts. Final clusters were also reduced and the inventory of inal consonants restricted to resonants and stops, this leading to the emergence of tones. hus the classical ‘Indochinese’ typology common in its major features to Middle Chinese, Vietnamese, Miao-Yao, Tai, Burmese etc. was born. (Sagart 1999: 13) I will suggest that rather than thinking of a linear sequence of shits borrowed unidirectionally from Chinese to its neighbors, we should imagine several different linguistic systems competing with and succeeding one another, with the inal crystallization into Old Chinese including lexical material and grammatical he origins of Sinitic structure from more than one source. But the topic of this section is the prominent feature of Bai Yue-Sinitic typology which is not part of Sagart’s description, which deals only morphophonological proile which is shared not only by the Bai Yue languages and Sinitic, but also by Lolo-Burmese. hat is, of course, the SVO word order shared by Sinitic, all the mainland Southeast Asian languages, and, secondarily, Bai and Karen. Mainland Southeast Asia is well-known for its striking areal linguistic typology, characterized both by the elaborate and congruent tone systems discussed above (not shared by most Mon-Khmer languages) and by radically isolating SVO morphosyntax. Indeed the examples put forward to illustrate isolating typology are always languages from this area; aside from modern European-based creole languages, few if any other languages in the world are as resolutely free of any sort of inlectional morphology. In this respect Sinitic, at least roughly, sorts with the Southeast Asian rather than the Tibeto-Burman languages, which are characteristically agglutinative, SOV, and oten morphological very complex. But the Southeast Asian typological proile is much more complex than its simple monosyllabic SVO stereotype (see Enield 2003), and the degree to which the details of Sinitic syntax conform to it is a topic on which more research is badly needed (see Bisang 1996, 2008). Sinitic basic word order, at least, is a secondary feature acquired somehow from the southern languages. Most scholars, from Terrien de la Couperie on, see the shit in Sinitic as due to inluence from neighboring languages to the south; Egerod (1976: 59) points out that since SVO order is inherited in hai, “Chinese was largely a recipient rather than a donor in the early times … it is Chinese which borrows a new word order” (see also Benedict 1972, 1994; van Driem 2008). Indeed, all of the Southeast Asian groups have SVO syntax as far back as we can trace. And there are ample traces of earlier SOV patterning in Old Chinese (Cheng 1983). For a summary of the case for SOV syntax in pre-Old Chinese see the last chapter of LaPolla 1990. To take only one striking example of SOV patterning in Old Chinese, consider the sentential particle yě 也. his occurs frequently in equational sentences with no overt copula (Example 3), exactly parallel to the behavior of similar sentence-inal particles in many Tibeto-Burman languages, e.g. Classical Tibetan (Example 4): (3) 彼丈夫也，我丈夫也 bǐ zhàng.fū yě, wǒ zhàng.fū yě dem man final, I man final ‘hey [were] men, I [am] a man.’ (4) bram=ze de dbul=po zhig go Brahmin dem pauper a final ‘hat Brahmin [was] a pauper.’ (Mencius 3.1)   Scott DeLancey In Tibeto-Burman these sentence-inal particles derive from old copulas (DeLancey 2011b), which is why they oten continue to function as such in equational sentences. heir inal position is thus directly attributable to the SOV of the TB languages. A parallel history for Old Chinese yě 也 is not the only imaginable explanation for its position and behavior, but is certainly the most economical. For that matter, we even ind clear evidence for an SOV past in synchronic Chinese syntax (Dryer 2003; D. Xu 2006; F. Wu in this volume). Particularly striking is the fact that despite their SVO clause order, Sinitic languages all place relative clauses before the head noun, a characteristically SOV pattern. Dryer and Wu argue that these phenomena in Sinitic languages are better explained as Altaic inluence than as Tibeto-Burman residue. his is certainly not impossible, but not all of the evidence is as clear as these authors suggest. It is true that both pre- and post-head relative clause constructions occur in Tibeto-Burman languages, oten in the same language. But the occurrence of pre- vs. post-head relative clauses in TB is not random. here are three basic relative constructions which occur in the family: nominalized clauses serving as genitive modiiers to the head noun, nominalized clauses serving as appositive modiiers, and, in a few languages, relative pronoun constructions calqued from neighboring Indic languages. It is the irst of these which is structurally comparable to Sinitic relative clause constructions, and in all Tibeto-Burman languages, as in Sinitic, genitive-marked relative clauses are invariably prenominal. Post-head relative constructions in TB languages are always of one of the other two types. A more crucial point is that, if this is the explanation for the SOV features in modern Chinese languages, we are presumably looking at northern inluence at the Proto-Sinitic level, since most of the SOV-like features which these authors mention are as true in Yue as in Mandarin: [I]t must be stressed that the proportio of N-Mod structures in Yue, Hakka, etc. is extremely small, and that Mod-N is the overwhelmingly dominant order in all dialects at both morphological and syntactic levels.” (Bennett 1979: 94) here is ample evidence for Altaic inluence speciically on northern Chinese over the last two millennia (Hashimoto 1976a, b, 1986; Wadley 1996, inter alia), but this can explain only those features which distinguish Mandarin from languages like Min and Yue. It is clear that the southern Sinitic languages, and especially Yue, manifest the strongest and deepest Bai Yue, and especially Dai, inluence (A. Hashimoto 1976; Bennett 1979; R. Li 2005). his certainly relects the non-Sinitic substratum on which Chinese culture was imposed as it spread south, in other words, many of the substratum features which distinguish the southern from the northern Sinitic languages must have been acquired since he origins of Sinitic Proto-Sinitic times. M. Hashimoto (1976a, b) and others trace putative Altaic features, both syntactic and phonological, back only as far as the collapse of the Han Dynasty and ensuing invasions from the north. Although population movements certainly brought many refugees from the north to the south of China, it is implausible that this could bring about signiicant word order shits in the local languages, but this is a necessary part of any hypothesis in which southern word order features are to be explained in terms of post-Proto-Sinitic inluence from Altaic or other northern languages. hus any of Altaic or more generally northern inluence must date back to before the southern expansion of Chinese, that is, to Proto-Sinitic. A simple model in which Proto-Sinitic is a typical Tibeto-Burman language which gradually adapted certain southern linguistic features implies that the mix of SOV and SVO constructions in Chinese should show a gradual and unidirectional tendency toward more SVO and less SOV over time. An important body of research (Peyraube 1997a, b; Djamouri 2001) shows that in fact we ind that Shang era materials show more consistent SVO patterning than later Zhou inscriptions; we will return to the implications of this in Section 3. . he sources of Sinitic here is no question that the formation of Sinitic involved contact with neighboring languages, including Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, and Hmong-Mien, and very possibly others which have completely disappeared. here has been a certain tension on the question of what sorts of contact might be involved. Traditionally there seem to be two basic possibilities: contact between adjacent languages, i.e. imagining Proto-Sinitic, Proto-Hmong-Mien, etc. as spoken in adjacent states, or super-substratum inluence, i.e. an “elite dominance” model in which ProtoSinitic formed in a state consisting of immigrant Tibeto-Burman conquerors interacting with indigenous Proto-Tai-Kadai or Proto-Hmong-Mien subjects. Both of these have important deiciencies; in this section I will develop an alternative model which is better suited to explain the kinds of data we have been considering. . Typology and diachrony: he “creoloid” pattern Our problem is to imagine a context for the formation of Sinitic which provides for a broadly mixed lexicon, and some basic Sino-Tibetan morphological structure with Southeast Asian creoloid syntax. Obviously we are looking at a language contact or language mixture situation, as scholars have noted for over a century   Scott DeLancey (Terrien de la Couperie 1887; Matisof 1973, 1992; LaPolla 2001, 2010, inter alia), but these general descriptions encompass a wide variety of phenomena, oten with quite diferent outcomes (homason & Kaufman 1988). In homason and Kaufman’s terms we are looking at both borrowing and language shit. he syntactic and phonological convergence between Sinitic and the Bai Yue languages is far too deep to represent simple borrowing between neighboring languages; we have to imagine a situation with extensive long-term bi- or multilingualism. Sinitic is, in homason and Kaufman’s terms, a language “in which a number of structural interference features are to be attributed to the efects of language shit, but in which enough inherited grammatical patterns remain that genetic continuity has clearly not been disrupted” (homason & Kaufman 1988: 129). Typically this involves the replacement of morphological categories by syntactic expressions (1988: 129), which is precisely the essential diference between PST and Sinitic morphosyntax. When we compare the conservative, highly morphologized TB languages (especially the rGyalrongic, Kiranti, and Nungish groups) with the transparent agglutinative pattern found in the larger and better-known branches (modern Tibetan, Lolo-Burmese, Bodo-Garo), we see the kinds of “simplifying” efects which are known to occur in situations of intense language contact (homason & Kaufman 1988; Ansaldo & Matthews 2001; Dahl 2004; McWhorter 2007; Trudgill 2009, 2011, inter alia), and when we look into the history and prehistory of the regions where these branches emerged, we see evidence for just the kinds of situation of intense contact which we know produces such linguistic changes (DeLancey 2010b, 2012, to appear). In Sinitic the efects are even more dramatic, involving a shit to SVO constituent order. But they are of the same kind, and must be explained the same way. he similarity of the isolating Sinitic-Southeast Asian morphosyntactic proile to creole languages has been noted for some time.4 But history gives us no reason to imagine that Sinitic at any stage was ever a true creole, in the traditional sense of a language which develops from a grammarless pidgin. Ansaldo and Matthews (2001, 2007) consider it a “creoloid” language, a pattern which arises in “heavy contact situations involving typologically distant varieties” (2001: 311). his is a common diachronic phenomenon resulting from “non-normal” (homason & Kaufman 1988), “suboptimal” (Dahl 2004) or “interrupted” (McWhorter 2007) transmission, i.e. one or more historical episodes in which a signiicant number of adult members of the speech community were non-native speakers using the language as a lingua franca or supralect: Language contact has this consequence [reduction in complexity] because of pidginization. he most extreme outcome of pidginization is the development of a pidgin language, but this is a very rare occurrence. It is only pidiginization at its he origins of Sinitic most extreme, together with a number of other unusual factors, which combine to lead to the development of pidgin and, even more rarely, creole languages. Pidignization can be said to occur whenever adults and post-adolescents learn a new language. (Trudgill 2009: 99, emphasis original) “Pidginization” is probably not the most apt term for this phenomenon, since we are dealing with languages which show the constellation of typological features traditionally associated with creole languages but do not have the typical history of a creole: Perhaps a more constructive way to see the “prototypical creole” traits is that languages which have been subject to intensive contact involving several typologically distant varieties will tend to show some combinations (or subset) of these features. (Ansaldo & Matthews 2001: 317) Such languages arise in conditions of intense contact, when for whatever reason some signiicant portion of the language community are second-language rather than native speakers (McWhorter 2007). his kind of development has occurred, and continues to occur, repeatedly in Sino-Tibetan, and it is clear that Sinitic has the same kind of history. . he linguistic context he territory where Sinitic languages are spoken was an area of substantial linguistic diversity from prehistoric times (Terrien de la Couperie 1887; Pulleyblank 1983, 1995a; Ballard 1984; Luo 1990; LaPolla 2001; Blench 2008, ms., inter alia). We are particularly concerned with the languages of the southern peoples who the Chinese referred to as Bai Yue 百越 (“Hundred Yue”), which seem to have been of mixed provenance, including Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien languages (JZ Li 1994; Meacham 1996; LaPolla 2001). he precise nature of the Austroasiatic element is in some dispute. Strong connections between Sinitic and Vietnamese are clear, but the existence of a deeper Austroasiatic stratum, as suggested by Norman and Mei (1976), is not universally accepted; the debate partly hinges on the question of the center of disperal for Austroasiatic (see Diloth 2011; Sidwell & Blench 2011; Sagart 2011; van Driem 2011). he Yue people and kingdom to the south are a long-term presence in Chinese history, but the irst explicit reference to the “Hundred” Yue is in the Qin era Annals of Lü Buwei: For the most part, there are no rulers to the south of the Yang and Han rivers, in the confederation of the Hundred Yue tribes [百越之际], in the territories of Bikaizhu, Fufeng, and Yumi, and in the states of Fulou, Yangyu, and Huandou. (Knoblock & Riegel 2000: 112/Book 20/1.3)   Scott DeLancey his term is important because it makes clear that the reference of Yue is multiethnic (Luo 1990: 268). he question is, how does Chinese come to share large bodies of vocabulary, and characteristic phonological and morphosyntactic typological proiles, with these languages? Benedict’s and Nishida’s suggestion that the language of the Shang dynasty was of non-Sino-Tibetan provenance, and that Old Chinese represents the outcome of the imposition of the Sino-Tibetan speech of the Zhou conquerors on a Shang substrate, provides a possible explanation for the southern features in Sinitic – assuming that the language of Shang was of Bai Yue stock, which is certainly likely. But it doesn’t directly account for the distribution of the Southeast Asian morphophonological proile, and the widely shared lexicon, both of which are shared among Sinitic, Viet-Muong, Hmong-Mien and Tai-Kadai. On the simplest version of Benedict’s hypothesis, we would rather expect to ind extensive sharing between Sinitic and whichever of these families was represented by the language of Shang. he fact that four quite distinct stocks share the same phonological-syntactic proile and common lexical stock suggests that the seedbed of Sinitic was broader, not conined simply to the interaction of Shang and Zhou. Still, this is a place to start. Nishida (1976) insists that, while the language of Zhou “must have been very close to the Tibeto-Burman languages”, that of Shang was non-Sino-Tibetan. He demurs from speculating about the ailiation of the language of Shang, but presents one example which suggests a Hmong-Mien ailiation. Regarding Benedict’s hypothesis, he says: his view is possible, of course, though it could be based on a somewhat diferent assumption. he Shang language belonged to some unknown family and was of the SVO type in its word order. his SVO word order was already evident in the records of oracle bones and in bronze inscriptions. On the other hand, it can be suspected that the language of early Chou originally had SOV word order, which is a very distinctive feature of Tibeto-Burman. I supposed that the early Chou tribe, formerly having no writing system of its own, had borrowed a writing system from the Shang language, as a member of the Shang cultural area, as a result, the Chou language changed from the SOV type to the SVO order under the strong literary inluence of the Shang writing system. (Nishida 1976: 36) We cannot accept the whole of Nishida’s suggestion; it is hardly imaginable that the writing system as such had much to do with fundamental systemic changes on the morphosyntactic structure of the language, especially in a context where only a miniscule portion of the population could have been literate. But the scenario suggested here, involving some assimilation of the language of Zhou toward that of Shang prior to the dynastic shit, ofers the possibility of a more nuanced history than implied by Benedict’s simple model of Zhou superimposed on Shang. he origins of Sinitic . he origins of Sinitic Any account of the origins of Sinitic must conform to the essential picture of a contact situation between western invaders speaking a TB tongue and locals speaking languages ailiated with one or more of the attested mainland Southeast Asian stocks. But it is not enough to simply say “contact” and pretend that we have explained anything. In this view of Sinitic we have a very speciic outcome, with Sino-Tibetan lexical and grammatical core, heavy Bai Yue lexical inluence, creoloid syntax based more on Bai Yue than on Sino-Tibetan patterns, and innovative phonological structure. his did not come about through people overhearing each other’s languages on market day, or learning a few phrases for doing business; we have to imagine a situation of widespread bi- or multilingualism. his would be the case in a scenario in which Chinese or pre-Chinese speakers conquered a Bai Yue population, as happened as the kingdoms of Chu 楚 and then Yue 越 were incorporated into Qin China. But this does not automatically explain the extent of the inluence which we ind on the whole language. Ballard’s (1984) “Mother Soup” metaphor captures the problem but doesn’t solve it. More importantly, the most important contact phenomena predate the assimilation of the southern kingdoms into imperial China. he southern kingdoms became part of China in the course of the Qin imperial expansion, by which time the essential features of Old Chinese had been established for centuries. Once again, with Nishida, we have to be concerned with contact beginning prior to the Zhou conquest of Shang. Following the suggestions of Benedict and Nishida, we focus particularly on the time of the replacement of the Shang Dynasty by Zhou, formerly a western vassal state of presumably Tibeto-Burman origin. But in this context it is a mistake to suppose that the deep and pervasive areal phenomena which we see could be the simple result of a single dramatic historical event. Ater the establishment of the Zhou Dynasty we can certainly expect the language of Zhou to have had some inluence on surrounding languages. But prior to that, when Zhou was subordinate to Shang, there would presumably have been inluence in the other direction. And, since there must have been a history, over at least a century or two, of increasing Zhou strength and inluence ultimately leading to the dynastic shit, the language of Zhou could well have been inluential in the region for some time prior to the fall of Shang. Although the historicity of the Xia Dynasty is not considered to be established archaeologically, we can hardly imagine Shang to have emerged ex nihilo, and there is ample archaeological evidence for urbanization and early state formation well prior to the traditional dates of Shang, and even Xia. Major imperial states like Shang are the result of centuries of conquest and consolidation of smaller citystates. Chang (2005: 126) cites a Qing dynasty historian Gu Zuyu 顾祖舆 who in   Scott DeLancey the Du Shi Fang Yu Ji Yao estimated that there were 10,000 states (guo 国) at the beginning of the Xia dynasty (2100 BCE), but that 500 years later at the foundation of the Shang dynasty these had been consolidated to 3,000, and by 1,000 BCE at the beginning of the Zhou dynasty there were only 1,800. hus already in the third millennium BCE we have a picture of imperial expansion which would have involved substantial armies being raised, and marched of into foreign lands, and substantial populations being subjugated or enslaved. And it is this process that I propose is at the root of the Southeast Asian typological proile, and the birth of Sinitic. So we have a set of linguistic phenomena requiring a fairly complex model of language contact and interaction, at a time and place where we have ample evidence that the linguistic situation was indeed extremely complex. he history of Sinitic involves more than simply the contact of two languages in a conquest situation. What I propose is that the features which so dramatically distinguish Sinitic from other Tibeto-Burman branches, and connect it with each and all of the Bai Yue languages, relect the use of Proto-Sinitic as a lingua franca, used widely by non-Chinese (by whatever deinition) outside of the actual administrative control of the Chinese state. In the multilingual context of early China and its neighbors, we can imagine the utility of a vehicular lingua franca even without reference to the Chinese state and its inluence. By the time the Chinese state is present on the historical stage, some version of its language would be a likely candidate for this role, but it is very plausible, indeed more likely than not, that there would already have been a widely-used vehicular language in the region. Let us hypothesize, following Nishida’s implicit suggestion, that the language of Shang was of Bai Yue stock. here are non-linguistic reasons to suppose that the predominant element was Hmong-Mien, which more and more seems to have been the language spoken by the irst cultivators of rice in the Yangtze basin (van Driem 2011), and thus likely to have been a dominant language in the region from 3–4 millennia ago. Genetic evidence further singles out Hmong-Mien as a major player in the formation of the Han ethnicity. Most research connecting genetic and linguistic distributions is primarily concerned with the origins and higher-order connections of the major families, and thus focuses on earlier eras then we are interested in. (See van Driem 2005; Chu 2005; Poloni et al. 2005 for discussion of some of the issues). Rather than any deinite correlation with linguistic groups, the major division in East Asia is between a northern and a southern population, with both Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman-speaking groups split across the north-south divide (Chu et al. 1998; Bo, Xie et al. 2004; Bo, Li et al. 2004). One robust inding is the considerable genetic diversity of southern Han populations, strongly implying that Chinese speakers include substantial populations that once spoke some other language. he genetic picture is consistent with he origins of Sinitic the implications of linguistic analysis that Sinitic was born of an intrusive TibetoBurman language meeting an entrenched language of Bai Yue origin: [T]he interaction between Chinese and other southern populations occurred ater the divergence of the Chinese and Tibeto-Burmans, and a limited gene low occurred between them ater the divergence. (Bing et al. 2000: 585) Many researchers report evidence of long-term contact among the various southern groups (Chu et al. 1998; Yao et al. 2002; Bo, Li et al. 2004; van Driem 2011), with later introduction of Sino-Tibetan elements. Bing et al. single out HmongMien among the southern populations as particularly involved in the origins of the Han, and thus presumably of Sinitic, and deduce a history of: … strong interactions between the Han and Hmong-Mien peoples that have lasted for several thousand years, as is conirmed in history literature, although a possible shared ancestry can not be ruled out. (Bing et al. 2000: 585) We ind a disproportionately male contribution of Sino-Tibetan-associated genetic markers in the southern Han population (Bo, Xie et al. 2004; van Driem 2011), evoking van Driem’s “father tongue” scenario, in which “mothers passed on the language of their spouses to their ofspring” (2012: 198), which would go a long way toward explaining the massive and fundamental Bai Yue efect on the structure of Chinese. But in historical context we do not necessarily need the explanatory power of the “father tongue” scenario, as we have a perfect context for creolization in any case. As the Shang state grew in power and inluence, its language must have been widely used among the neighboring groups, both the Bai Yue to the south and Sino-Tibetan neighbors such as Zhou to the west, as a lingua franca. Here we have a major motive force in the development of the Southeast Asian typological proile. As a lingua franca, this language would accommodate vocabulary from various language communities, and this is the origin of the substantial body of lexical material which is shared across all four of the SEA-type stocks. As the Zhou state increases in power and inluence within the sphere of Shang, the representation of its Sino-Tibetan language in the lingua franca grows. By the time of the establishment of the Zhou Dynasty, the lingua franca is widely spoken in a version with signiicant Sino-Tibetan vocabulary, but still with syntax based on the language of Shang. When Zhou takes over the empire, there is, as on Benedict’s model, a temporary diglossic situation, in which genuine Zhou speech is, for a while, retained in the ruling class, but among the formerly Shang population, Shang speech is gradually replaced not by “pure” Sino-Tibetan Zhou, but by a heavily TibetoBurman inluenced version of the lingua franca. In similar situations, certainly   Scott DeLancey in all subsequent instances of the institution in China of a foreign dynasty, we see the vehicular language, rather than the speech of the foreign invaders, ending up as the language of administration. We do see, in Old Chinese, SOV as well as SVO syntactic patterns, such that Cheng (1983) speaks of “two sublanguages coexisting in early archaic Chinese”, an earlier SOV stratum and an innovative SVO syntax, and Xú (2004) of a “typologically mixed” language. his would, essentially, be “pure” Sino-Tibetan Zhou with SOV syntax, and the Zhou-inluenced lingua franca spoken with the SVO pattern of the Bai Yue languages. In this context the observation noted in Section 1.3 that Pre-Archaic Shang oracle bone inscriptions are more consistently SVO than Zhou era material, which show noticeably more SOV constructions, makes complete sense: as Benedict and Nishida suggest, the language of Zhou represents a Tibeto-Burmanization of a previously substantially Bai Yue, and thus presumably SVO, language. Sinitic as it emerges into history is then the result of a subsequent process of assimilation of the lingua franca of the subject population toward the Sino-Tibetan speech of their rulers. hus we see overwhelmingly Sino-Tibetan vocabulary, but with extensive, but unsystematic, lexical remnants of earlier versions of the lingua franca. he Sino-Tibetan inheritance extends to pronouns and derivational morphology, but, as is typical in language replacement, the complex Sino-Tibetan inlectional morphology disappeared. he stubborn retention of the SVO word order template can probably be suiciently explained, as Benedict suggests, by the fact that the vast majority of the population spoke an SVO language or languages and always had. Notes . If all of these languages should be related in something like Sagart’s (1994a) or Starosta’s (2005) East Asian phylum, it would be at greater time depth than we are considering here, and the relevant evidence is of a different and more obscure sort. . 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